Kees to the City

Brendan Bernhard, the literary ghosthunter of the East Village, pays homage to a poet whose name is little-known and yet who continues to exert a tugging fascination, Weldon Kees.

A cultural oddity of the East Village is that it has more often been a home to poets than novelists. Some of the poets (Allen Ginsberg, W.H. Auden) are about as famous as poets get. Others (Edwin Denby, Bernadette Mayer) are known to only a few. The vast majority, as you would expect, are almost completely unknown.

Weldon Kees, who lived at 129 E. 10th Street (the apartment building directly next to St. Mark’s Church) from October 1943 until November 1945, and later rented a loft at 179 Stanton Street in the Lower East Side, is an exception. As a cult figure with an ardent following, he’s certainly known to some people – but his connection to the East Village has been all but forgotten. Perhaps that’s appropriate: An absence as much as a presence, a shadow where a human should be, Kees is the Harry Lime of modern American poetry, as in the character played by Orson Welles in “The Third Man”: Now you see him, now you don’t.

Born in Nebraska in 1914, Kees was a dark-haired, always well-dressed man with a pencil mustache, an ever-present cigarette, and a slightly shady, B-movie aura. His life in New York was ostensibly one of multiplying successes – a reviewer for Time and art critic for the Nation, a madly multi-tasking documentary filmmaker, jazz musician, and artist (he exhibited with the likes of Robert Motherwell, and Willem De Kooning, though his reputation as a painter has faded) as well as a poet, and an acquaintance or friend of most intellectuals of note in the city. Yet an early champion of his work, Donald Justice, called him “one of the bitterest poets in history,” and the one emotion you will be hard pressed to find in his writing is joy. Its unmentioned absence is part of what gives his work its scary, third-rail power, and makes “The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees” one of those special books to which initiates form a lifelong attachment.

Although Kees lived in the neighborhood before it was officially known as the “East Village,” he was nonetheless a good fit. The French term, poète maudit (cursed poet) is appropriate to Kees, in a part of New York which once prided itself on being full of cursed poets. Less a radical than an instinctive dissenter with a black satirical streak, he and his wife, Ann Swan, were anti-establishment skeptics in the midst of the post-war American Dream, relatively uninterested in those supermarket staples no serious literary New York household could live without: status, glory, power. (At a party, Truman Capote rebuked Kees for being insufficiently interested in fame, though it would be more accurate to say he disliked how people went about achieving it.)

Bernhard discusses Kees poetry and his post-NYC life, which ended in suicide--a leap off of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. His body was never found, feeding speculation that he might have faked the leap or survived it, leading a fugitive life in Mexico under a false identity. Unlikely, given the odds of carrying off such a ruse, and given that those Kees spoke to before his disappearance--including film critic Pauline Kael--were alarmed at the farewell tone in his voice.

Suicide infiltrates everything related to Kees.

Three years ago in the Los Angeles Times, the novelist and Kees fan Richard Rayner recalled buying a copy of Kees’s poems in a used book store in Finland. The owner of the store then told him that the book had previously belonged to a promising young Finnish poet who had killed himself. Later, looking through the book, Mr. Rayner saw that the final line of “January” – “Sleep is too short a death” – was one of several that had been lightly traced by the dead poet in pencil.

And I would note that there were two other well-known residents of East 10th, footsteps away from St. Mark's Church.

The first was the critic Seymour Krim, the other was photographer Diane Arbus; they lived in the same building, on adjacent floors; both would later commit suicide.

I realize this isn't the most fun, upbeat post, but consider this a different kind of hauntedness as Halloween approaches.